iPod Can new iPods work with USB 1.1 Macs and/or OS X 10.2?

[Puppies]

I'm excited here-my mom is talking about wanting an iPod Nano! I'd love to get her one, but just realized looking at the requirements, I'm not sure her iMac could use it.

She's got a G3 iMac with USB 1.1 (and Firewire, which dosen't help on these new 'Pods). She's also got OS 10.2.8, which won't run iTunes 7 or the newest version of Quicktime.

So this is really two seperate questions.

The big question is, can the new iPods work with USB 1.1? Obviously it would sync slower, but that's okay. Or did Apple actually prevent it from working with 1.1? (And if so, geez they're cutting off a lot of fairly recent Macs.)

Secondly, will they work with an older version of iTunes-6.x something? Or would it actually be nessisary to upgrade to 10.4 just to use the iPod? At least that's POSSIBLE.

 

[mox358]

In response to the first part of your question, yes - newer USB 2.0 iPods will work over a USB 1.1 connection, just very, very, very slowly. I used a 60GB iPod with video on my old G4 iMac for a very long time. It was horribly slow but USB is backwards compatible.


As for the iTunes deal... generally Apple bundles the drivers for new hardware with software... meaning the drivers for the Nano are most likely included with iTunes 7 and only with iTunes 7. There's a chance they might include then on the iPod install disc. But I would assume you would have to use iTunes 7. I could be wrong and hopefully someone with deeper knowledge of software can prove me wrong.

 

[Chundles]

The new nanos require iTunes 7. The 1G nano I think requires iTunes 5.

 

[Wolfpup]

Okay, thanks! Sounds like the hardware would work, but I'd need to upgrade the OS.

 

[Wolfpup]

I got my iPod "5.5G" last night. I got a chance to test it out on a USB 1.1 iMac with OS X 10.2, and can confirm that:

-It doesn’t work with the OS-it pops up a message saying this iPod requires iTunes 7

-It APPEARS to work with USB 1.1. The computer immediately saw it, it was mounted as a disk, the iPod’s little access indicator was going etc.

So it LOOKS like these new iPods will work with USB 1.1, but you need OS 10.3 or better.